Neil wrote:

Ahmad's relationship with Olga goes precisely nowhere

While it is suggested that his relationship with a married woman at the beginning of the movie was much more meaningful. Love was central to his life then, and he was exiled because of it. Now that he's become a warrior, however, his relationship with a woman is just a brief respite between two battles. A kind of sneezing relief.

I think in that sense it's a very different kind of decentred morality to that in B7 (struggling to get back on topic), since in B7 there is a tacit awareness of being morally adrift, whereas in 13W it is not acknowledged, or is indeed denied by clutching at feeble fatalistic straws (there are several references to fate in the film, and the futility of trying to avoid it).

I believe this is a translation of the OE word 'weird', which at that time meant 'fate'. I haven't read anglo-saxon poetry since the University, but I recall that the notion of destiny was central to it. The ancient meaning of the word 'weird' is 'natural'. At the time when Beowulf was written, it has already acquired a negative connotation, as something you cannot avoid, something that gets you in the end. By the time Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, the meaning of 'weird' has become completely reversed, as in the 'weird sisters'. The history of this word is practically a nutshell history of our culture's attitude to nature. In Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters, however... no, I don't think I can interpret that on a serious note.

N.